October 30, 2025 : Issue #100
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME
For our hundredth fortnightly issue, a Cabinet Exclusive: A report on our old friends Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s astonishing residency in Marfa—five concerts in two-and-a-half days, complete with a harrowing blackout.
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A HUNDREDTH ISSUE CABINET EXCLUSIVE
With pianists Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov
across their marathon highwire Marfa Residency
I.
Its happening to be the night of the new moon this past September had been part of the whole idea, though later on the two of them might well have had some second thoughts.
During a reconnaissance visit earlier in the year to Marfa in the West Texas high desert scrublands, Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov, the London-based Russian émigré life and professional piano partners (familiar to readers of this Stack from multiple prior appearances, including here and here) had been drawn to the site itself, the Stone Circle (an earlier land-art project by the fellow London-based artist Haroon Mirza, a mysterious faux-neolithic pocket Stonehenge-like circle of obtruding boulders incongruously slotted into a remote patch of dry grass desert a few miles outside town) by the place’s own powerfully magnetic aura.
Their hosts from the town’s Ballroom cultural mecca had explained to them how Mirza had actually hollowed out the boulders in question, filling them up with speakers and other electronic equipment programmed to come to life but once a month, at midnight on the full moon, suddenly lavishing any happenstance passers-by with a full-bore forty-five minute solar-powered son-et-lumière experience, before falling silent once again till the next full moon.
When Tsoy and Kolesnikov realized that the final installment of their own eventual two-and-a-half-day five-concert iron-man site-specific marathon of a residency would fall on the night of the new moon beneath a pitch-black sky, they figured what better place than there to stage their famous four-hands-across-one-piano rendition of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring—a veritable pounding whirling dervish of entangled arms and digits—notwithstanding all the complications such an undertaking would involve, including erecting a raised wooden platform in the middle of the circle and two temporary makeshift towers off to the sides from which to mount the stage lights that would illumine the keyboard, and for that matter painstakingly ferrying the Yamaha concert grand piano itself, an instrument of jewel-like precision, out to the remote hardscrabble site, cushioned in the bed of what looked like a horse trailer.
But do so the people at Ballroom Marfa did, such that now, nine months later, on the last night of the pair’s epic marathon, several hours after sunset, hundreds of townsfolk and other guests gingerly filed down the barely flashlit incline
toward a circle of chairs girdling the piano (with countless others standing, beyond the boulders, all around that) to watch as Tsoy and Kolesnikov at length emerged from the night-swallowed desert beyond, took their places snug on a single bench behind the keyboard and launched into the piece, at first ever so delicately but presently with compounding ferocity and propulsiveness (as the Ballroom’s photographer Sarah Vasquez ranged all about, grabbing some great vantages, several of them included here).
Someone standing toward the back managed to register this representative passage and passed the video along: it may give you some idea.
To see the video, click here.
Sitting in the front row there, off to the side, I remember how at one point a grasshopper came flitting out of the pitch night alighting on the glaring platform under the extended piano, and seemed for a while to rock and wriggle to the music, growing ever more agitated until presently it launched itself straight up, bashing into the piano’s undercarriage and collapsing back onto the platform, momentarily dazed and battered, rolling about on its back, until, staggering, it somehow managed to right itself and proceeded to repeat the entire exercise all over again.
A few minutes later, I happened to have my own iPhone trained on the pianists, when… well, this happened:
To view the video click here.
Suddenly both stage-lights fritzed out simultaneously, plunging the entire assembly into a fathomless inky darkness, though at the same time allowing the vast vault of the star-spangled desert sky (streaked from horizon to horizon by a riverine Milky Way) to wheel back into view. Was this some sort of freakish accident, we all gasped, or rather, as many in the audience gradually came to suspect, might it be yet another coup de theatre on the part of this endlessly innovative pair with whose antically unpredictable feints we’d all been growing increasingly familiar over the previous few days. Some audience members flicked on their phones’ flashlights and tried shining them helpfully onto the keyboard, though they were quickly shushed down by neighbors anxious at possibly blowing the intended effect. For somehow the duo continued playing, their faces, illumined by the single foot-pedal-controlled iPad which went on scrolling the unfurling score, as they played, from within the piano’s well—their faces, moonlike (suddenly the only luminosities, for that matter, for miles in any direction) reflecting whatever meager light in turn still managed to eke its way back down upon the night-thrust keyboard. And playing through ever more complex and demanding passages. Just to give you an idea, here is the online video of one ensuing passage recorded on a more conventional soundstage some months earlier and posted as a teaser for the recent release of their CD of the piece:
To see the video, click here.
Imagine doing that in the pitch dark! And yet do it they did and kept on doing (Sarah Vasquez drifted back into the scrub brush and managed to catch perhaps the shot of the night).
Minutes passed, five, ten, and somehow they kept playing, whether in the seamlessly intentional or calamitously accidental inky-darkness none of us in the audience could still quite tell…
II.
I say I happened to be in the front row. Actually, it wasn’t quite so happenstance as all that, for in a roundabout way, I’d had a bit to do with the pair’s ever having alighted in Marfa in the first place. Regular followers of this Stack will recall how a couple years back, I’d been visiting my old friend and subject David Hockney in his London compound when he’d invited me to stay on for an upcoming recital (I had noticed a jet-black grand piano being carted into his studio next-door and could now hear as it was being tuned up). Hockney went on to explain how a curator friend had arranged for these two young Russian pianists to play for him and a small clutch of his friends from their repertoire of music for four hands on one piano, notably including Stravinsky’s Rite (an especially moving prospect for music-loving David himself, who, increasingly deaf, was nonetheless going to be able, sitting right there by the piano’s side, to experience the sheer physical force of the unfurling music—and for that matter, in the event, for the rest of us who were thereupon vouched the privilege of witnessing such a bracingly happy occasion in person).
I arranged to spend an evening with Pavel and Samson a few nights after the recital, during which they regaled me with details of their own history and practice, and particularly the ways in which they had been growing increasingly interested in engaging with the legacy of visual artists, with concerts specifically pitched to the aesthetic surround of Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, David Hockney and others (a theme we revisited a few months later in a conversation I conducted with them for Gagosian Quarterly). In the context of all that, I described for them the general scene in Marfa, the place’s history, and specifically the interactions there of Donald Judd and Robert Irwin whose site-specific explorations (a history I’ve likewise explored in these pages previously here and here) I suspected they might find especially confluent with their own, and indeed they did seem to grow more and more intrigued.
A few weeks after that, they happened to mention to a friend in passing how interested they’d be in someday visiting Marfa, and that friend, who happened to know her, subsequently mentioned their interest to Virginia Lebermann, a cofounder of Ballroom Marfa, one of the town’s premier cultural institutions, who then traveled to London to attend one of Pavel’s Goldberg Variations concerts, after which she invited the two of them to come visit Marfa with an eye toward some future collaboration, which they then proceeded to do a couple months later, at the beginning of this year.
In my own mind’s eye (or ear), I’d imagined them interacting with some of the town’s splendid art pieces in much the way that Samson, for example, had recently done, performing monumental works by Bach and Beethoven upon several pianos banked against the sinuous curves of Richard Serra’s monumentally torqued ellipses at the Guggenheim Bilbao—responding similarly, for example, to Judd’s array of hollowed-out concrete cubes spread amidst the spiky dry grasslands along the perimeter of his Chinati Foundation, or perhaps even better inside the light-blasted converted artillery sheds further in with their own array of luminous milled-aluminum boxes,
or better yet in Irwin’s revamped former hospital with its sheer diaphanous scrim walls (ebony down one corridor, ivory down the other).
Talk about interfacing with art in a site-specific sort of way!
But as things developed, Pavel and Samson would come up with an approach that was even more challenging. While lodging for the better part of a week as houseguests of Ballroom Marfa’s other cofounder, Farifax Dorn, they asked the Ballroom’s creative director, onetime rock concert producer Vance Knowles, to take them on wider and wider looping drives across the terrain surrounding the town—terrain the likes of which they’d never previously encountered and under whose spell they were becoming increasingly entrammeled—and they presently resolved that rather than trying to commune with the justifiably celebrated art (indeed they held off visiting any of the art till the very last day), they would instead themselves endeavor to respond directly to the lavishly changing light and high wide skies, the scudding clouds and the parched scrub, the wafting breezes and the random commotions, the flat horizons intercut by those far-off peaks and buttes—in short, the very same qualities in the landscape that had so inspired and determined the work of earlier visual artists like Judd and Irwin in the midst their own site-specific passions.
“In other words,” they subsequently told me, “by way of a carefully curated sequence of concerts, we are going to attempt the first site-specific musical response to an extended landscape.” Across those five January days, they proceeded to narrow a welter of possibilities down to twenty especially compelling sites, and then ten, and then three or four (Knowles would subsequently roll his eyes at the memory of the winnowing process). But on the very last day, they happened upon the most compelling such site yet, a completely dilapidated wreck of a one-time cattle auction barn that they’d repeatedly been passing but never before bothered to park and look inside, and, as Samson recalls, it was magnificent. In prospect anyway: in actuality, the entire structure was sagging, the gates rusted off their hinges, the skylights broken, the tin panels peeling off their casings, the bleachers warped and buckling, the central pavilion a scatter of rotting small mammal skeletons under tattered catenaries of abandoned spider webs—but such potential! And somehow the Boys convinced the Ballroom folk to buy the place and spruce it up in time for its deployment as the central concert site in the series they were now planning for only nine months hence. Talk about specifying a site!
In much the way that Judd or Irwin’s site-specific praxis required mastery of a whole wide variety of material practices—wood, metal, stone, scrim, concrete, paint, vegetative matter, etc.—the thing that made the Boys’s site-specific ambitions even remotely possible, over and beyond their staggering technical proficiency on their chosen instrument (the chops they’d had endlessly drilled into them in the Tchaikovsky Conservatory back in Moscow) was their astonishing command of a vaster instrument yet, which is to say the virtual entirety of Western piano canon of the past four hundred years, which they seemed capable of deploying at will and in ever-more imaginative ways: a veritable palette, as it were, of potential references. Thus, approaching the five-concert-in two-and-a-half days marathon, now scheduled for mid-September, they could dispense with such conventionally cliched options as Coplandesque cowboy dances or adaptions of Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite or souped-up renditions of “Home on the Range” in favor of far more surprising and deeply felt responses to the far-flung array of their chosen vistas. Such as, for instance:
A couple miles outside town, greeting travelers coming in from El Paso, was the flaking, decrepit signpost for the Stardust, all that remained of a long-abandoned and even long-since levelled motel—cars and trucks zoomed heedlessly past it all the time, but the boys had Vance pull over and the three of them climbed over the wire fence out onto a slight rise overlooking what was in fact a breathtaking view of the desert grasslands as they fell off into the distance, and they resolved to start their series there. First, of course, they were all going to have to get buy-in from Yamaha, the pair’s artistic sponsors, convincing them to lend them not one but two of their exceedingly delicate, exquisitely machined, CFX concert grand pianos (probably having them shipped in from Los Angeles, along with their dedicated crew of movers) for deployment across a decidedly sketchy series of dusty hardscrabble sites. But somehow they did, and indeed once the day arrived they had even secured the services of Yamaha’s ace tuner and technician Shinya Maeda out of their New York Artists Services operation. Such that:
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 18
Several hundred chairs were set up facing the low-slung jerry-rigged platform upon which the pianos had been mounted that morning, facing each other cheek by jowl, with that infinite view stretching out beyond them into the distance—a view, however, which was becoming more and more ominous as the day wore on, thick black storm clouds sweeping up from the south out of which kept pouring sheets of rain, though eventually the squalls skirted their site by a mere few hundred feet just an hour before the scheduled start of the concert. Around 7 pm, the first arriving patrons (Ballroom Marfa was charging $100 per person for full-series tickets, but nobody was checking, and as the good-natured crowd gathered, it seemed to draw pretty much evenly from all social strata of the community) were even able to scry a reassuring rainbow hovering benignly over the waiting pianos. Programs scattered atop the seats led with Samson and Pavel’s scene-setting for the coming evening:
Here, on this spot, there used to be a motel called The Stardust. People came and went, enjoying drinks, watching the sunset, chatting, dancing, and listening to music.
Now, little remains to remind us of those times. Patches in the grass mark the position of the building’s foundation. The sign by the road still stands, and the line of the horizon remains unchanged. This is enough for us to recall what we never actually witnessed.
With the sounds of an old waltz, the happy memories flow back, and the old motel comes alive once more—just for tonight! Welcome to the Stardust, welcome to a ballroom beneath the sign of Cygnus! As the night deepens and the stars shine brighter, the sounds of the pianos intertwine and flicker, revealing deeper meanings and hidden connections. What happens here will never be repeated. Cinderella may have lost her slipper long ago, but there is still one last waltz to dance—or maybe a thousand!
And as the sun now dipped toward the horizon, Pavel and Samson entered stage right, elegantly decked out as is their perennial wont, took seats facing each other across opposing pianos, and launched into an extended arc of lilting waltzes, some familiar, others not (Reynaldo Hahn, Johann Strauss II, Debussy, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin, concluding with Prokofiev again, the finale from his Cinderella—see video snippets of the Rachmaninoff here and of the clock striking twelve on Cinderella here).
Following intermission, Samson returned by himself to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (during an especially soft and delicate passage, the earth itself began to rumble as, honk and honk again, a locomotive began its relentless approach, bringing on a subtle smile across Samson’s face as, following a brief surcease, he himself now tore into the pounding Presto Agitato of the sonata’s last movement, matching the passing chugging train volume for volume as it gradually faded past and into the distance), followed by the two of them performing their former expatriate Leonid Desyatnikov’s strangely apt Du Côté de Chez Swann (by this time the sky had gone jet black, with the moths and the mites swirling about in the light beams, seemingly in time with the music—see a video snippet here) ending the concert with both of them tearing into the increasingly frantic deconstructions of Ravel’s Valse: Poeme choreographique, at the climax of which the audience rose up with a roar of sustained appreciation. As people at length began leaving they noticed how the Ballroom Marfa people had taken care to restore and relight the highway-facing Stardust Motel sign, iconically aglow once again for the first time in decades.
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 19
Worker bees from Ballroom Marfa and Yamaha must have been busy overnight because by the next morning a brace of portable chairs had been transported to the far other side of town, to the very rim of a large gravelly expanse, pressed up against a broad grassland vista with buttes and mountain peaks rising in the distance beneath a vast cloud strewn sky. And as assorted early-risers gradually took their places on the chairs, facing out toward the view,
suddenly the distant tinkle of piano aires began wafting in from behind them, for indeed, about fifty yards behind everyone atop makeshift wooden platforms about twenty yards from each other, Pavel and Samson were pacing their Yamahas through pieces by Cage, Glück, Messiaen and Mozart. (For the complete program notes and music listings for this and all the other concerts, see here, and for a video of a portion of the Cage, click the link here, and note the way no one turns around to face the players, except me just that once, everyone is more than content to let the music wash over and past them and into the world beyond.) At one point, during the Mozart, a military helicopter went barreling by (click video link here)—the border with Mexico is only thirty or so miles to the west, and on top of everything else, Marfa hosts a US Border and Customs operation—but presently it was gone, and Mozart was still milding the world. Eventually, though, the music came to a stop, and when at length people turned around to see what had happened, Pavel and Samson could be seen loping off into the obverse distance, like the heroes at the end of an oldtime Western movie.
Later that evening, however, people gathered once again for the inauguration of Marfa’s newest cultural amenity, the resurrected old cattle auction barn (rechristened, unfortunately, as the Bullroom, though people may yet have second thoughts about that as time goes by)—and the Boys’s instinct had been dead on: thanks to the lightning ministrations of the Ballroom’s restoration crews, the place indeed exuded a hushed majestic splendor.
“We drove past this place five or six times before we saw it,” Pavel and Samson recounted in their program notes.
At first glance, it looked like little more than a massive pile of rubble by the roadside. Inside, however, we were met with an extraordinary surprise: a powerful, monumental space, untouched and waiting to be rediscovered—and reinterpreted—after years of neglect.
This was an amazing discovery that we made together with the Ballroom team. Eight months later, the primeval, universal architecture of the space is now ready for everyone to admire. For this momentous occasion, we are bringing together three of the most extraordinary works of sound architecture—three invisible monuments—spanning three centuries.
(Veterans of this Stack may recall how my grandfather, the Weimar émigré composer Ernst Toch used to speak of the architectonic of music, by which he meant the sequential exposition of material in a formful manner across time rather than space, a formulation which I myself in my own teaching have always felt applied equally well to written narrative.)
A single piano graced the central stage, and this time Samson came out by himself for the first half of the program, featuring, for starters, a brutally challenging work by the Soviet avant garde iconoclast Galina Ustvolskaya (“a reclusive and uncompromising…composer,” according to the Boys’s program note, “nicknamed ‘the lady with the hammer’ for the extreme power and austerity of her music, [who] created works as impressive as they are bewildering”—an estimation with which I daresay the majority of the audience might have tended to concur), followed by (the by-then deaf) Beethoven’s last piano sonata (“a work of immense complexity and emotional intensity, rising from the depths of despair to the metaphysical heights of understanding and acceptance—without doubt one of the greatest pinnacles of art”).
Following an intermission (splendidly catered, as usual, by the good folks of the Ballroom), Pavel emerged to grace the proceedings with a shimmering performance of one of his signature solo extravaganzas, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. (Alas, I was too spellbound the entire evening to remember to video-record any of it, but at least with this latter you can access Pavel’s own five-star CD recording, the site for which includes representative snippets.) Toward the end of Pavel’s performance, the earth began once again to tremble ever so slightly and one could make out the chugging passage of another train, this time more distant. “I know,” Samson subsequently exulted, “I thought to myself, which new pedal maneuver has Pavel invented this time?” And for his part, Pavel chimed in, “Wasn’t it great? And did you notice how the low drone came in there in the very penultimate movement, the one where Bach hearkens back, heart-rendingly, to an old folk song from his childhood, it was as if the train itself were bearing the tune forward.”
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 20
Such blithe openness to chance happenstance was one of the themes Pavel and Samson returned to the next morning at 11 a.m., when back at the newly converted cattle auction house the two of them joined me for a public conversation prior to their upcoming noontime offering (two pianos were gracing our platform backdrop this time, as if in expectation). Pavel explained how “Music has this unique ability to be specific to the place and moment, infinitely”—an uncanny formulation since, as I pointed out, specificity would seem to be finite by definition (wasn’t that the whole point of site-specificity?). Indeed, Pavel replied, but what he meant was that, at least in their own practice, and especially out in the world like this, the two of them were always modulating their performances in response to chance variables—the acoustics of the space, the varying engagements of their audiences, the coughs and breezes, the warblings of birds and insects or passing trains and helicopters—all of it bringing out subtle new shadings, both in the music and their performance of it. I mentioned how Pavel’s formulation had reminded me of the way Kierkegaard spoke of the occasional perpendicular intersection of divine time into the procession of the merely quotidian—going on to read a passage from my grandfather Toch:
Nearness to life, nearness to nature and humanity—who has it? I think the one who contains in himself an irrational, unconquerable bastion, untouched, for which I have no other word but religiousness. To be sure, this quality does not refer to any specific creed. It has nothing to do with a man’s interests and activities, nothing to do even with the conduct of a man’s life. The word “religion” derives from the Latin “religare”—to tie, to tie fast, to tie back. Tie what to what? Tie man to the oneness of the Universe, to the creation of which he feels himself a part, to the will that willed his existence, to the law that he can only divine. It is a fundamental human experience, dim in some, shining in others, rare in some, frequent in others, conscious in some, unconscious in others. But there is no great creation in either art or science {or, I interjected, performance?} which is not ultimately rooted in this climate of the soul, whatever the means of translation or substantiation.
And the Boys nodded emphatic concurrence. I was trying to get them to prepare the audience for the truly epic piece that was to follow, Messiaen’s achingly elaborated Visions de l’Amen, but they weren’t interested in any further elaborations of their own, wanting to let the experience of the music speak for itself, except to note how this morning, this onetime cattle auction house—a place, as it were, of sacrifice (I myself was put in mind of great paintings by Rembrandt and Soutine and Bacon)—had taken on the aspect of a temple.
Whereupon, following a short break, and barely forty hours into their marathon, the pair launched into arguably their most arduous and demanding performance yet, with successive movements devoted to the Amens of the Creation, the Planets, the Agony of Jesus, Desire, the Angels and Saints and Songs of the Birds, Judgment and finally Consummation.
A consummation devoutly to be wished, indeed.
As the audience, pretty much spent even if the performers weren’t quite yet, were filing out of the auction shed, we reminded everyone, speaking of intimations of sacrifice and the divine, to reconvene later that night in the Circle of Stones for one last exaltation.
Which brings us, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, back to….
III.
…the Failure of those Marfa Lights, as I’d taken to thinking of it, as the minutes flowed on and Stravinsky’s Rite kept building toward wilder and wilder (and more and more performatively demanding) crescendos, still in the pitch dark under that star spangled canopy. Finally, with just a few minutes to go in the performance, the lights flickered back on, and the Boys now coasted through the piece’s climactic final sacrificial dance.
And at least they were now able to see the crowd’s rapturous response, both to the piece and its specific performance, and then more generally, to the conclusion of the whole mammoth undertaking. After several bows, Pavel and Samson staggered back out into the surrounding night.
Leaving the rest of us with the impression that we’d been privileged to witness an event that will prove legendary both in the careers of these two young masters and in the ongoing fable-drenched history of Stravinsky’s extraordinary piece itself.
Seriously, though, which had it been—accident or intended?
I had occasion to find out, around half an hour later, when I met up with Samson and Pavel at the after-party for them and their many collaborators—Virginia, Fairfax, Vance, Shinya, the two Sarahs, the piano wranglers, the caterers, and the tech crews—at the Ballroom’s Capri Lounge and Restaurant back in town.
The two of them were beaming. “No!” Samson exclaimed in response to my query. “We hadn’t planned that at all, nor would we have: it was downright terrifying!”
“And it was so weird,” Pavel interjected, “for it happened at the very moment that Stravinsky had inserted a new section indication in the score which read, in its entirety, ‘Night.’”
I pulled out my iPhone and showed them my own happenstance video capture of the moment when the lights had gone out.
“Look at that,” Pavel now marveled. “Look how you can see me, muttering under my breath, ‘Just keep going, just keep going, just keep going.’”
In English or in Russian, I wondered.
“Oh, Russian,” Pavel hazarded. “It must have been Russian. We always revert to Russian in moments of high drama, and, believe me, we were completely, but completely, panic-stricken.”
Could have fooled us, is all I have to say.
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A-V ROOM
Ren in conversation with Samson and Pavel
in Marfa, September 20th, 2025
As it happens, Ballroom Marfa did have a crew there under the command of the London-based Saudi filmmaker Sarah Brahim documenting the entire Tsoy/Kolesnikov residency, and she no doubt got much better footage than I was able to with my iPhone, footage she is currently in the process of editing into a final version, which I can’t wait to see. Meanwhile, however, she graciously allowed us access to her master shot recording of my Saturday morning public conversation with Samson and Pavel in the newly converted cattle auction barn outside Marfa, which begins (at Ballroom Marfa’s request) with my own sidewinder account of the remarkable sequence of overlapping coincidences, going all the way back into the 1970s, which had eventually brought us all there to that moment. That’s showrunner Vance Knowles introducing me. The tape runs 45 minutes.
And to watch it, click here.
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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive
animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com
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